On May 23, KMOV TV in St. Louis, a CBS affiliate, aired a report about an “independent planning firm” that issued an economic impact study on the effect the CITY SC soccer club had on the St. Louis region in 2023. The segment featured Carolyn Kindle, the club’s CEO.
The report made a number of claims, according to the graphics presented during the interview. The print version of the story on the website included the following bullet points:
- The construction of CITYPARK and its 32-acre campus created an additional $1.4 billion in economic impact since 2020.
- The direct cost of the privately owned stadium campus—which includes the stadium, team training facility and practice fields, team store, parking garage, and corporate headquarters—was $667 million.
- The overall impact includes approximately $122 million in incremental tax revenue, including $33 million in local and state tax revenue, and $15 million in infrastructure upgrades to lighting, sidewalks, bike paths and streets in the surrounding area.
Those bullet points come directly from the news story.
Kindle said in the interview “We were all very, very, very surprised” by the results of the study. I would be too. The vast research on the impact of professional sports teams indicates they generate no such economic impact. The Journal of Economic Surveys concluded in 2022 that “nearly all empirical studies find little to no tangible impacts of sports teams and facilities on local economic activity, and the level of venue subsidies typically provided far exceeds any observed economic benefits.”
Kindle added of the research, “We’re very excited, when the time is right, to share it.” When might that be? I emailed CITY SC on May 23 asking for an electronic copy of the report and heard nothing. I emailed again on May 30 and was told the next day, “We haven’t yet released the full study results, just the highlights. It is something we will likely do in the future but timing is TBD.” I asked what event they were waiting on to release the report. It has been over a week and I’ve received no response.
It’s more than fair to wonder if this report contains the flaws of other similar analyses that count only spending at the venue and discount any losses in spending elsewhere. But we don’t know, because CITY SC hasn’t shared it yet.
Does that mean KMOV ran the segment without independently verifying the information?
At the bottom of the KMOV article is an invitation to readers: “For more information on the study, click here.” That link only takes you to a page of news releases for CITY SC, in which the club makes the exact same claims that appeared in the story, word for word. My advice to news outlets is to trust but verify. When it comes to claims of economic impact such as these, the claims are often overblown and based on significantly flawed analyses. Until the full report is available, we won’t know the rest of the story.
